SEO for websites with similar content?

Question

One of my clients has four childcare websites with all similar content. Some content has been copied over to describe characteristics of their childcare centers and same with their about page which is almost an exact copy across all websites. These childcare centres have different names so they cannot be branched under one domain name.

These websites have four different domains and have some different content but share quite a large amount of similarities.

Is it possible to maintain these copies without taking a blow from Google considering its from the same brand or will these have to be amended?

Answer 1

If there is one owner owning different childcare centres and if that is okay for the audience to know that all four are connected if there is no legal or any other issue surrounding that, then the best option would be to create one common platform say: oliverchildcare.com and promote all four with different names through same channel.

like oliverchildcare.com/centres/centre1 , oliverchildcare.com/centres/centre2 . . .

cross promoting different centres would have its own advantages attached with it, as per customer experience as well as SEO.

If you can lay your product like above, nothing like it. Then if you want to promote a service, you just need to create one common source and can add which centres provide this particular service at what timings.

But if you are putting common content across all 4 channels and want all of them to index and rank, it would be a very tedious task and might end up with none of them indexing.

But if you can go ahead and give one of them wightage, then there are multiple ways of doing so, one of them being putting canonical from all others to one primary domain.

I would recommend creating a common one and promoting all there, if this belongs to one common client/entity/organisation and is more of multiple centres for same type of activity rather than different services all together

Answer 2

If you want to use similar kind of content on multiple sites then you can do it but it depends of some things such as:

1. Whether your sites using - Multiple Domain or Subdomain
2. Whether you are using - Different Domain Extensions
3. Whether you are set - Different Target Audience depend on domain extensions
4. How much percent(%) of content you are using common over all sites
5. Whether it is for Responsive purpose or something like mobile version and desktop version etc.

Case 1. A. Using Multiple Domain or Subdomain Ans: You need to index one of those domain to search engines and nofollow to rest of the sites. You need to determine a site as main site which will be indexed with search engines and then have to send traffic to other sites with same content.

Case 2, 3. Different Domain Extensions Ans: If your multiple sites are using Different domain extensions base of locality like .in, .us, .uk etc then you just have to list it with Google business listing - but it must be under single individual/business name. (Have no idea you can do same with Yahoo and Being or not).

Case 4. percent(%) of content you are using common Ans: If you are using less than content with some unique content then it won't harm. Some percent of common content is ignored by Google but its not disclosed by it. As its part of algorithm.

Case 5. Responsive purpose Ans: If you are making multiple sites for responsive purpose for better user experience for mobile, desktop, tablets, notebooks sizes etc. then you can do it surely; you just have to use google relative guideline and refer canonical urls for all the sites here also you have to remember that it is also based on a single site and other sites will be like sister sites.